The Gore meeting is part of a disquieting pattern of unelected Trump kids playing simultaneous roles in daddy's business empire and serving as something of a kitchen cabinet to the inexperienced and largely uninformed future president.

This pattern really struck me last week after reading reports about a conversation Eric Trump had with concerned Palestinian-American comic Mo Amer,who sat next to him on a plane to London. When Amer asked Trump if his dad really intended to force Muslims to register, the Trump son said, "You can't believe everything you read. Do you really think we're gonna do that?"

Bill Clinton was widely mocked in 1992 when he suggested that his wife was so smart that voting for him meant you'd get "two for the price of one." But now we've elected Donald Trump, who campaigned as the ultimate "decider," yet has come to realize that all decisions will be made by a group — the one around his Trump Tower dinner table.

Donald ran his campaign as the ultimate “decider,” but now he’s turning to his posse for every decision.

(JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/Getty Images)

What's wrong with that? Let us count the ways:

1. Trump has already said that his children — Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr. — will run his sprawling (and still mostly secret) business empire. But if they are also involved in government decisions, that's an immediate conflict of interest.

When Ivanka Trump joined her dad for her meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, she was also in the process of inking a Japanese licensing deal for her Ivanka Trump-branded merchandise. The deal is being negotiated with Japanese retailer Sanei International, whose parent company is (cue the dramatic music) the Development Bank of Japan, which is entirely owned by the Japanese government, as Fortune reported. So it's likely that President-elect Trump and Abe discussed many things that are crucial to the United States' relationship with its main Pacific ally — security, trade, the environment — and Ivanka got to put in a good word about her bracelets.

2. Ivanka Trump has also sat in on the meeting where Gore apparently tried to convince the President-elect that 99% of the scientific community isn't wrong about global warming. Put aside for the moment that Al Gore isn't IN that scientific community and that the President-elect and his daughter need better experts than a messianic egomaniac, but why was Ivanka there? Is she going to be her dad's point person on global warming, as the incoming administration has already suggested? Or was she there merely to give cover as her dad makes good on his campaign promise to revive the coal industry?

Donald Trump Jr. (l.), Ivanka Trump (c.) and Eric Trump (r.) are a little too close for comfort to their father’s transition into the White House.

(Joe Raedle)

3. When House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the President-elect last month, he talked with her about infrastructure and domestic policy, according to the New York Times. But when she wanted to talk about "women's issues," Trump handed the phone to his daughter, presumably because, like the congresswoman, she also has experience with blood coming out of her wherever. Stop for a moment and consider the hell that would have been raised by the right wing if a Congressman called President-elect Hillary Clinton to talk about his job-training proposal and she handed the phone to Bill.

4. Donald Trump Jr. met in October with "diplomats, businessmen and politicians" in hopes of "finding a way to cooperate with Russia to end the war in Syria,” the Wall Street Journal reported last month. The meeting, just a week before Election Day, wasn't revealed until voters had chosen Donald Trump Sr. as president. That might not have happened if Americans knew that his son was already helping to formulate his dad's proposed capitulation to Russia in the Middle East.

There has been one piece of good news about Donald. For now, he seems content to just kill animals rather than work in his dad's smoke-filled room.

5. When the President-elect had his post-election meeting with some Indian businessmen, all three kids were on hand. The businessmen are building a Trump-branded apartment complex, so this meeting was a bit of international diplomacy mixed in with family business.

You know, just like a Mafia family does it.

6. Eric Trump has bolstered his dad's outrage that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had the temerity to ask for a recount so we can know once and for all whether our election machines have been hacked. "The Sad Truth," Eric tweeted Sunday. "The Cost Of Stein/Clinton's #Wisconsin Vote Recount Could Have Saved At Least 5,000 Children's Lives." That lone tweet, judging from how his dad appoints staffers, makes Eric Trump qualified to run Health and Human Services. He had never before tweeted anything about children's health.

The "four-for-the-price-of-one" thing swells to five if you include Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner, who has been his father-in-law's main adviser and, according to reports, may serve as a Middle East peace envoy. Oh, but wouldn't you know, the Washington Post just reported that Kushner's family foundation donated to West Bank settlements, a move that doesn't exactly convey American integrity at the bargaining table, given that our government under both Republicans and Democrats has long considered those settlements counter-productive to the peace effort.

Now, don't get me wrong; I think it's great when families are close. But Ivanka, Donald Jr., Eric and Jared weren't on the ballot on Nov. 8. Donald was. And if he keeps getting his primary advice from the people running his business empire — or running their own operations — we won't have a democracy, but an oligarchy.